Paradise Lost
by Slash4Femme
Summary: and this is the way it will end.


_This story is based on the movie The Village. It takes place after the end of the movie. I do not own any of these character or world. _

Paradise Lost 

The day Ivy Walker returned to the village it was raining. Those who lived there tended to the sick and buried the dead, and when the spring came, and Ivy and Lucius Hunt were wed. When the fall came again Ivy announced that she was with child. The child was born again in the spring, a girl who they named Rose. All were relieved to learn she had been born without her mother's affliction. Life returned to normal in the village. No one spoke of Towns or Lucius' accident or Noah Percy's death. Years past, and the elders grew older, and became grandparents. Rose grew brave like her father, and strong willed like her mother, with her father's dark hair and eyes and her mother's smallness of bone. Many hoped one day she would become the schoolteacher and spoke of what a fine wife she would make. Time went on, unchanging.

All was well in the village until the summer of Rose's sixteenth year. That summer Lucius comes down with a mysterious illness, sweating and feverish, Ivy is beside herself and becomes even more so when the doctor confirms that something has happened to the old wound from so many years ago. The Elders meet to discuss what can be done, and the village seems to shut down. Children are kept in side and people stay to their houses as much as possible, the adults whisper that this has happened before seventeen years ago. Rose divides her time, holding her fathers hand and comforting her mother. Once she finds her mother standing outside the house facing towards the woods, although how she came there Rose does not know, but Ivy does not resist her when Rose guides her gentle back inside. Lucius Hunt dies only a few short days after becoming ill. Ivy cries until she makes herself sick and the doctor gives her something to help her sleep. It seems strangely appropriate to those who remember that they burry Lucius in the rain.

After her father's death Rose, stops going to the school house, she no longer goes out with her cousins, and she does not speak to anyone except her mother. She stays to the house or wanders alone and makes sure her mother eats and sleeps and get out of bed everyday. She goes on like this for almost four weeks until suddenly she calls for her grandfather, Elder Walker, to attend her at her mother's house in the middle of the day. When he comes he finds her sitting at the kitchen table, with his own box and Lady Elder Hunt's open before her. He stops in the doorway staring at her, staring at what she has in front of her the silence stretching long between them. She speaks first, her voice calm and even.

"Mother knows."

It is not a question, so he doesn't deny it.

"How much did she tell you?"

"As much as you told her, but that's not the whole story is it?"

He clears his throat

"It was enough"

"But not all. You never told her all of it."

Her voice is hard now with steal in it, a quality he has never heard there before.

"Because she was weak? My mother is not weak. As her father you should know this. You should have let her make her own life, instead of constantly keeping her in the dark."

"We did it for her own good. For all of you, so you would not have to know"

He voice is trembling now, as he struggles to justify what should not need to be justified, the way thing have always been in the village.

"No. There is no right here. You Elders are not the righteous ones."

She spreads her hands pointing first at the boxes on the table then at the window out into the village.

"You made our lives out of your fear and grief. Does that seem right to you?"

"You don't understand"

He tries

"They killed my father, you can not know"

She is on her feet faster then he would have thought possible her black morning dress swirling around her.

"I wouldn't understand what grandfather? What if feels like to loose my father?"

She is almost yelling now

"Or are you saying your grief is greater then mine?"

He looks at her at a lose for what to say in the face of her anger

"Run and hide. All my life, all my mothers life, that is all you've ever taught us. To run and hide, while you lie and lie."

She moves suddenly shoving one of the boxes off the table, the papers and pictures inside spilling across the floor

"Cowering in the dark like children, because you are afraid of something that happened long ago. No I won't pay for your fear with my life, not any more."

A chill goes through him and he begins to understand.

"No"

His voice is a whisper

"No. You can't leave the village, you can't. You weren't raised in the Towns. You don't know. . ."

She crosses her arms over her chest

"That was not my doing"

"No"

He is shaking now

"Rose please there is evil there."

She looks out the window towards the woods were the watchtowers stand.

"I don't believe in evil, grandfather. Only men who do evil things and even our watchtowers and safe colors can not keep them away."

She turns away from him

"You and the other Elders will tell lies when I leave wont you? Tell the children something happened to me. Maybe I'll become a warning against those who might want to leave?"

He bows his head and doesn't answer

"Did you ever think"

Her voice is almost soft

"That there is more then one kind of evil in the world"

He feels tears come to his eyes. He wants to beg her to forgive them to understand what they did, wants to hug her make her stay, keep her safe. He remembers when she was born holding her in his arms; remembers when her mother was born.

"We won't lie, not anymore"

She smiles for the first time since her father's death

"Good."

She leaves a week later, he mother cries for another week after that. She's only the first, as more children leave, going back to the Towns and the lives their grandparents and parents gave up. Some still pretend there is nothing beyond the village and the woods, but most know and life will never be the same again.


End file.
